Nature Mysticism Part 10

Thus c.u.mulative is the evidence that the present, for all its materialism, inherits the essence of the ancient mysticism; or rather, it is open to the same impulses and intuitions, however changed and changing the forms they may a.s.sume. On the one hand, the infinite complexity of man's developing soul-life; on the other, the limitless range of the moods and aspects of the ocean: the two are spiritually linked by ultimate community of nature: deep calls to deep: the response is living and eternal.

CHAPTER XXIII

WAVES

The most familiar appeal of the Ocean is that of the wave which speeds over its surface or breaks upon its sh.o.r.es. Poets have found here an inexhaustible theme. Painters have here expended their utmost skill. Whether it is the tiny ripple that dies along the curving sands, or the merry, rustling, crested surf that hurries on to wanton in the rocky pools, or the storm billow that rushes wildly against an iron-bound coast to spurt aloft its sheets of spray or to hurl its threatening ma.s.s on the trembling strand--in each and every form the wave is a moving miracle.

Through every change of contour and interplay of curves, its lines are ever of inimitable grace. Its gradations of colour, its translucent opalescence framed in gleaming greens and tender greys, wreathed with the radiance of the foam, are of inimitable charm. Its gamuts of sounds, the faint lisp of the wavelet on the pebbly beach, the rhythmic rise and fall of the plashing or plunging surf, the roar and scream of the breaker, and the boom of the billow, are of inimitable range. What marvel is it that even the commonplace of the sons of men yield themselves gladly to a spell they cannot a.n.a.lyse, content to linger, to gaze, and to ponder!

If the spell of the waves enthralls the ordinary mortal, how much more those whose aesthetic and spiritual senses are keen and disciplined? Coleridge, while listening to the tide, with eyes closed, but with mind alert, finds his thoughts wandering back to

"that blind bard who on the Chian strand By those deep sounds possessed with inward light, Beheld the Iliad and the Odyssee Rise to the swelling of the voiceful sea."

Swinburne, listening to the same music, exclaims:

"Yea, surely the sea like a harper Laid his hand on the sh.o.r.e like a lyre."

Sometimes the emphasis is on the sympathy with the striving forces manifested in the ceaseless activity of the ocean as it

"beats against the stern dumb sh.o.r.e The stormy pa.s.sion of its mighty heart."

Sometimes the emphasis is on the subjective mood which that activity arouses:

"Break, break, break, On thy cold gray stones, O sea.

And I would that my tongue could utter The thoughts that arise in me,"

Sometimes the two are indissolubly blended as in the song, "Am Meer," so exquisitely set to music by Schubert--where the rhythmic echoes of the heaving tide accompany the surging emotions of a troubled heart.

The direct impression made by the objective phenomena of the play of waves finds abundant expression in the whole range of literature--not the least forcefully in Tennyson. How fine his painting of the wave on the open sea.

"As a wild wave in the wide North-Sea Green glimmering towards the summit, bears, with all Its stormy crests that smoke against the skies, Down on a bark, and overbears the bark, And him that helms it."

How perfect also the description of a wave breaking on a level, sandy beach:

"The crest of some slow-arching wave, Heard in dead night along that table-sh.o.r.e, Drops flat, and after the great waters break Whitening for half a league, and thin themselves, Far over sands marbled with moon and cloud, From less and less to nothing."

As to the moods thus stimulated, the one most frequently provoked would seem to be that of sadness. Or would it be truer to say that those whose thoughts are tinged with melancholy, or weighted with sorrow, find in the restless, endless tossing and breaking of the waves their fittest companions?

How sad this pa.s.sage from the French poet-philosopher, Guyot.

"I remember that once, sitting on the beach, I watched the serried waves rolling towards me. They came without interruption from the expanse of the sea, roaring and white.

Beyond the one dying at my feet I noticed another; and farther behind that one, another; and farther still another and another--a mult.i.tude. At last, as far as I could see, the whole horizon seemed to rise and roll on towards me. There was a reservoir of infinite, inexhaustible forces there. How deeply I felt the impotency of man to arrest the effort of that whole ocean in movement! A dike might break one of the waves; it could break hundreds and thousands of them; but would not the immense and indefatigable ocean gain the victory? And this rising tide seemed to me the image of the whole of nature a.s.sailing humanity, which vainly wishes to direct its course, to dam it in, to master it. Man struggles bravely; he multiplies his efforts.

Sometimes he believes himself to be the conqueror. That is because he does not look far enough ahead, and because he does not notice far out on the horizon the great waves which, sooner or later, must destroy his work and carry himself away."

Similar is the train of thought which finds poetical expression in Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach."

"Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!

Only, from the long line of spray Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land Listen! you hear the grating roar Of pebbles which the waves draw back and fling, At their return, up the high strand, Begin, and cease, and then again begin, With tremulous cadence slow, and bring The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles heard it long ago, Heard it on the AEgaean, and it brought Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow Of human misery; we Find also in the sound a thought; Hearing it by this distant northern sea."

And the thought! "The melancholy, long, withdrawing roar" of the Sea of Faith, retreating down the "naked shingles of the world!"

But if the pessimistic mood may thus find support in watching the waves of the sea, so no less surely can the hopeful and joyous mood be evolved and stimulated by the same influence.

Before Sophocles came AEschylus. The greatest hero of this earlier poet was Prometheus, the friend of man, who, tortured but unshaken, looked out from his Caucasian rock on the presentments of primeval nature. How sublime his appeal!

"Ether of heaven, and Winds untired of wing, Rivers whose fountains fail not, and thou Sea Laughing in waves innumerable!"

To him the winds and waves brought a message of untiring, indomitable energy--the movement, the gleam, inspired fresh life and hope. The ideas immanent in the ocean wave are as varied as the human experiences to which they are akin.

Or take another group of these ideas immanent in the phenomena of the wave--the group which rouse and nurture the aesthetic side of man's nature. Very significant in this regard is the fact that not for the Greeks alone, but also for the Hindus and the Teutons, the G.o.ddesses of beauty were wave-born.

When Aphrodite walked the earth, flowers sprang up beneath her feet; but her birthplace was the crest of a laughing wave. So Kama, the Hindu Cupid, and the Apsaras, lovely nymphs, rose from the wind-stirred surface of the sea, drawn upward in streaming mists by the ardent sun. So, too, the Teutonic Freyja took shape in the sea-born cloudlets of the upper air.

The loveliness of the wave, dancing, tossing, or breaking must have entered, from earliest days, deeply into the heart and imagination of man, and have profoundly influenced his mythology, his art, and his poetry. We trace this influence in olden days by the myths of Poseidon with his seahorses and the bands of Tritons, Nereids, and Oceanides--each and all giving substance to vague intuitions and subconscious perceptions of the physical beauty of the ocean.

And as for our own more immediate forefathers, the mystic spell of the ocean wave sank deep into their rugged souls.

"When you so dance" (says Shakespeare to a maiden) "I wish you a wave o' the sea, that you might ever do nothing but that."

The experiences of countless watchers of the wave went to the framing of that wish!

And, as has been richly proved by quotations from our modern poets, the mystic spell gains in potency as man's aesthetic powers are keener and more disciplined. The present-day nature-mystic needs no imaginary personifications to bring him into communion with the beauty, the mystery, of the ocean wave. He conceives of it as a manifestation of certain modes of being which are akin to himself and which speak to him in language too plain to be ignored or misinterpreted. Human knowledge has not yet advanced far enough to define more closely such modes of experience; but the fact of the experience remains.

CHAPTER XXIX

STILL WATERS

Tiefer Stille herrscht im Wa.s.ser, Ohno Regung ruht das Meer, Und bek.u.mmert sieht der Schiffer Glatte Flache rings umher.

Keine Luft von keiner Seite!

Todesstille furchterlich!

In der ungeheuern Weite Reget keine Welle sich.

Thus does Goethe, in this little poem of two verses, with a masterly ease that carries conviction, suggest to us the subtle power of a calm at sea. The mountain tarn, alone with the sky, has a charm that is all its own. The shining levels of the lake, in the lower hollows of the hills; the quiet reaches of a river where the stream seems to pause and gather strength for its onward course; even the still pool that hides in the meadows among the alders and willows: each of these has its own peculiar charm--a charm which is hard to a.n.a.lyse but almost universal in its range of appeal. But potent above them all is this Meeresstille, this calm at sea--when, as Bowring finely translates Goethe's second verse:

"Not a zephyr is in motion!

Silence fearful as the grave!

In the mighty waste of ocean Sunk to rest is every wave."

Turner, in his "Liber Studiorum," attempted to depict a calm at sea. The picture is not one of his most successful efforts: but so great an artist could not fail to seize on the essential features of his subject. The sun is heralding his advent by flinging upward athwart the mists and cloudlets a stream of diffused light which fills the scene with a soft pervading glow. The surface of the water is gla.s.sy, not much more substantial than the haze which floats above it. But deep as is the calm, old ocean cannot quite forget his innate restlessness; he gently urges onward a succession of slow risings and fallings, with broad ripples to mark their boundaries, and to tell of spent billows and far-heaving tides. The movement of the waters is, as it were, subconsciously felt rather than perceived; or, if perceived, it is lost in the pervading sense of placid s.p.a.ciousness. The boats and their occupants, so far from disturbing the sense of calm, are made to enhance it. And the unruffled surface of the water is rendered palpably impalpable by the magic of reflections.

Morris has given us a word-picture of similar import.

"Oh, look! the sea is fallen asleep, The sail hangs idle evermore; Yet refluent from the outer deep The low wave sobs upon the sh.o.r.e.

Silent the dark cave ebbs and fills Silent the broad weeds wave and sway; Yet yonder fairy fringe of spray Is born of surges vast as hills."

Jefferies gives us a companion picture of a calm sea in full sunshine. "Immediately in front dropped the deep descent of the bowl-like hollow which received and brought up to me the faint sound of the summer waves. Yonder lay the immense plain of the sea, the palest green under the continued sunshine, as though the heat had evaporated the colour from it; there was no distinct horizon, a heat-mist inclosed it, and looked farther away than the horizon would have done."